January 6 Was at Least a Riot

I must confess to being thoroughly baffled by the proliferation of jubilant responses to Tucker Carlson’s carefully curated videos of the January 6 riot. Last night, in recherché tones, Carlson told his viewers that the previously unseen footage he was offering up had “overturned the story you’ve heard about January 6,” and insisted that America would henceforth be populated by two discrete sorts of people: those whose false “perception of the day’s events” had been remedied by his presentation, and those who wished to remain “easily manipulated” by the powers that be. In Carlson’s mind, at least, his pitch represented a watershed.

On the homepage, Noah Rothman explains at length why this “monumental allegation is not supported by the facts” — and, in particular, why Carlson’s claim that his recordings do “not show an insurrection or a riot in progress” is incorrect. To Noah’s thorough exposition, I have nothing to add but this question: Suppose Tucker were correct. What, exactly, would that prove?

That some of the media’s claims about January 6 have been wrong — and sometimes deliberately wrong — is beyond doubt. That the January 6 Committee was at times partisan and political is indisputable. Also obvious is that both President Biden and his party have used the event to attack a set of mainstream conservative ideas that had nothing whatsoever to do with it. But to criticize this behavior does not require one to defend what happened on January 6 —which, seen even through Tucker Carlson’s oblique lens, represented an unforgettable national disgrace.

The clear aim of Carlson’s broadcast was to conflate the specific and the general in such a way as to inspire his audience to buy his conclusion, which is that the January 6 riot was not, in fact, a riot. But, as Noah implies, the attempt serves as a giant non sequitur: Some of the details that the press insisted upon were wrong, Carlson says, ergo what happened on January 6 wasn’t a riot.

This is ridiculous.

Because we prosecute people, rather than groups, it is, indeed, important that we discover exactly who did what on that day. As a categorical matter, however, those details are utterly irrelevant. Carlson wants us to believe that, by showing a few videos with which he believes we are unfamiliar, he has “overturned the story you’ve heard about January 6” — which, in his own words, was that it represented an “insurrection or a riot.”

Naturally, he has done no such thing. And how could he have? The story I heard about January 6 was that, in a fit of Trump-inspired pique, a mob of deranged American citizens entered the building that houses the federal legislature and caused unprecedented havoc. If one wishes to, one can nitpick interminably about the details, but one cannot alter the basic facts of the case — which are: (1) that Donald Trump lied repeatedly about the results of the 2020 presidential election; (2) that, in the course of doing so, Trump insisted preposterously that the 1876 Electoral Count Act and the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution gave Mike Pence the power to reinstate him as president; (3) that Trump put a great deal of pressure on Mike Pence to take this course of action; (4) that millions of Americans believed what Trump was saying and echoed the demands he made of Pence; and (5) that, in response to these provocations, a few hundred of those Americans desecrated the United States Capitol. At no point does Carlson lay a glove on any of these claims. Why? Because they’re demonstrably true.

Unsatisfied merely to muddy the waters, Carlson at one point goes so far as to insist that the January 6 mob was full of people who “revere the Capitol,” which, of course, is nonsense, and which remains nonsense even if some of those people were, as Carlson proposes, “peaceful,” “ordinary,” and “meek.” It may well be true that a few of the visitors walked into Congress unmolested; that the police at times engaged in “de-escalatory tactics”; and that, as is common when large crowds rile themselves, many of the citizens who were caught on camera got swept up in the commotion. But to believe that this in any way excuses or alters what happened next is to propose that once a person has peacefully gained entry to a public building, he may reasonably consider himself to have been granted carte blanche. There is not a person among us who believes that he is permitted to go into the United States Congress and break the windows and doors, write or defecate on the walls, put our feet up on the House speaker’s desk, or raise our fists above the Senate’s dais — yes, even if we got in more easily than we expected and the police were nice to us once we were in there. The very notion is absurd.

Nor does Carlson’s hairsplitting change the rioters’ motive, which, quite clearly, was not tourism or confusion or a sudden interest in the workings of the U.S. Senate, but a desire to interrupt the ratification of the 2020 presidential election and to put pressure on Mike Pence to — in the words that Donald Trump tweeted on the afternoon of January 6 — “have the courage to do what should have been done” (i.e., steal the election). There was one reason — and one reason only — why the rioters were so keen to get inside of Congress, and that reason was that Donald Trump had sedulously led them to believe that their democracy had been undermined by fraud. Unless one believes that every single one of the people who got in was a part of the greatest false-flag operation in American history, the mechanics of the thing are immaterial. This was a riot at best, an insurrection at worst, and nothing else besides.